Cassandra Summit 2012 –Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company ™ - delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined, today announced an alliance with DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra™. The partnership will make it easier for IT departments to organize and analyze data from Big Data workloads and traditional data sources. This approach will accelerate time to insight for business decision makers.

Both companies offer commercial products and services to support specific open source projects. Actuate supports, enhances and scales BIRT with ActuateOne to deliver business and consumer insights to the desktop and to touch devices. DataStax Enterprise (DSE) combines the performance of Cassandra with analytics powered by Apache Hadoop and enterprise search with Apache Solr, creating a smartly integrated, Big Data platform.

Cassandra Summit 2012: BIRT Exchange is a community site for BIRT developers who are adding reporting, analytics and business intelligence capabilities to Java applications. BIRT Exchange is a proud sponsor of the Cassandra Summit 2012, the premier global conference for the Apache Cassandra Community. The conference begins today, August 8 and will be held at The Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara.

What the Actuate and DataStax partnership means for BIRT developers:

The BIRT developer community is increasingly demanding support for Cassandra, the popular, Big Data NoSQL DBMS for online transactions. BIRT enables access to Cassandra data sources and facilitates further refinement and exploration of query results in a graphical, customizable and highly interactive manner. Query results can be combined with other data sources to provide further insight and analysis of an organization’s data landscape. Once key insights have been found, BIRT provides a plethora of exportable formats, (including XLS, DOC, PPT, PDF and Open Document Format) that can cater to however Big Data application end-users want to view and analyze the resulting data set.

“DataStax and Actuate customers in addition to the open source communities they serve, can now have real time insights delivered by BIRT, within the context of historical data and real-time transaction processing that Cassandra affords,” said Nobby Akiha, SVP Marketing at Actuate. “DataStax enables users to manage real-time, analytic and search workloads within a single cluster and Actuate delivers insights from any and all of these sources to any number of end users.”

What the Actuate and DataStax partnership means for the Cassandra community:

The Cassandra community has called for a scalable and flexible data visualization platform to deliver user-friendly, interactive insights. ActuateOne products provide a common interface and report design, making it possible to work across the organization with minimal effort.

“By partnering with Actuate, DataStax democratizes access to Big Data, delivering insights to data scientists and business decision-makers alike,” said Matt Pfeil, Co-Founder and VP of Customer Solutions, DataStax. “Cassandra as a Big Data foundation means businesses can run without ever going down, and BIRT as a business analytics and data visualization foundation delivers Big Data insights so that businesses know where they are going and how to get there.”

Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT open source project, which is used by over 1.5 million developers around the globe and serves as the foundation of the ActuateOne® platform. Applications built on ActuateOne deliver more business and consumer insights to more people than all BI companies combined - ensuring organizations are ready for the exponential growth of Big Data and the proliferation of touch devices.

If you're looking for the best, fastest, least expensive and easiest way to create and deploy rich, interactive reporting applications, BIRT is your solution. BIRT is one of the most widely adopted business intelligence and reporting technologies with over 12 million downloads and 1.5 million developers using it around the globe.

Sanctioned under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), BIRT has all you need to meet the data visualization and reporting requirements for the majority of application development and reporting projects. Commercial options form Actuate enhance usability, functionality and appeal by adding dynamic charting, dashboards, interactive viewing, customizable data visualization apps and a robust server which lets you secure, deploy and scale to millions of users all from a single, BIRT-based design. More information available at: http://www.birt-exchange.com.

About DataStax

DataStax offers products and services based on the popular open-source database, Apache Cassandra™, which solve today’s most challenging big data problems. DataStax Enterprise combines the performance of Cassandra with analytics powered by Apache Hadoop and enterprise search with Apache Solr, creating a smartly integrated, big data platform. With DataStax Enterprise, real-time, analytic, and search workloads never conflict, giving you maximum performance with the added benefit of only managing a single database.

The company has more than 200 customers, including leaders such as Netflix, Cisco, Pearson Education, Rackspace and Constant Contact, and spans verticals including web, financial services, telecommunications, logistics and government. DataStax is backed by industry leading investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Crosslink Capital, and is based in San Mateo, CA.

About Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure.

Cassandra evolved from work at Google, Amazon and Facebook, and is in use at leading companies such as Twitter, Netflix, Rackspace and Cisco. For more information, visit http://cassandra.apache.org/.